People said the exact same thing about (numbers from memory, might be off):

- when Google paid $1 bil for YouTube

- when Facebook paid $1 bil for Instagram

- when Facebook paid $1 bil for WhatsApp

The same thing - these 3 companies make no money, and have no path to making money, and that the price paid was crazy and decoupled from any economics.

Yet now, in hindsight, they look like brilliant business decisions.

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jakeydus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias?wprov=sfti1

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qcnguy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We don't really know how much money Google sunk into YouTube before it became (presumably) profitable. It might have actually not been strongly coupled to economics.

	▲	Izkata 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Also they attempted their own competitor before buying YouTube, called Google Video. It never got very popular.

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ThrowawayR2 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You listed only acquisitions that paid off and not the many, many more that didn't though.

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cmiles8 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There’s no comparison to what’s going on now vs those examples. Not even remotely similar.

	▲	dist-epoch 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that financially supports everything that’s going on you lack imagination, human workers are paid globally over $10 trillion dollars.